When I asked Shadowboy the annual question, “What do you want to be for Halloween this year?” and he answered confidently, “Cthulhu,” it may not have been my single proudest moment as a parent but it certainly made the list.

Fortunately I usually ask the annual question somewhere around February, so I had plenty of time to plan.

I also made a costume for Empress Pam’s niece again this year; it was a bit of a rush job by my standards (since we didn’t know she was lacking a costume until rather late in the game), but fortunately she wanted to be a dog, and compared to Cthulhu a dalmatian is a snap.

The Cthulhu version got reptilian feet cribbed from a dragon pattern,* webbed fingers (created by stitching channels in the costume “mittens”), and claws cut from vinyl. The tentacles were just conical tubes sewn from two contrasting fabrics that were stuffed lightly with fiberfill and attached to a thin strip of fabric sewn across the middle of the hood (I used the orange contrast to add a little detail to the head and hands too). I toyed briefly with using thin wire inside the tentacles to twist them into various positions but decided that they were too short to position effectively; it might be a possibility for an adult version of the costume.

The wings were inexpensive vinyl “demon wings” that were spray-painted with plastic-fusion paint to match the costume colors. The harness for the wings just had straps around the shoulders and didn’t anchor them effectively, so I added another strap around the chest. I made slits in the back of the costume so that the wings could be rolled up and passed through from the inside, hiding the harness.

As is traditional, the annual Halloween portrait will be added to my Big Wall o’Costumes. This one will go in a thematically-appropriate frame made of resin with lots of twisty bits.

And now it’s time to start thinking about next year’s costumes….

*I have a habit of buying likely-looking patterns whenever the local fabric stores have 99-cent sales, even if I don’t have an immediate use for them. I’ve generally found that hacking together pieces of different commercial patterns is easier than calculating measurements and drawing pieces from scratch.

I think it must be said: Oh. My. Elder. Gods. This is possibly the best part:

I made slits in the back of the costume so that the wings could be rolled up and passed through from the inside, hiding the harness.

although the CW-style hottie vampire guy modeling the wings at Amazon in a fashion that clearly indicates that he was greenscreened in on top of a separate photo of just-wings comes in a close second. Way awesome on all fronts.